With current update of MC 27 I am hearing occasional short pauses (less than 1/4 second) in playback of audio files. I tried increasing the buffer time and finally went to staging the entire file into memory for playback. Still experiencing the occasional pauses, very roughly from two to six per hour.
I have now heard this on two PCs - the larger one (where I'm listening now) has a 3.6GHz Xeon E5-1620 processor (4 core, 8 threads) and 32GB main memory. The concurrent load is very light for this machine: just MS Office and Firefox browser. The pauses happen at random and are not correlated with other activity (e.g. launching an app etc.).
Whenever a pause happened, I moved the play pointer back a minute or so to replay the passage - the pause is not there the second time, indicating a playback issue of a valid file.
It is getting rather irritating - and seems to be a new behavior of MC 27 in that past week or few weeks. Any ideas? I'm willing to take troubleshooting steps and send in the results.